Open Thread – 8/23/2020

Posted by TomCat at 10:42 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Aug 232020

It’s a crazy Sunday, here in the CatBox. I overslept by over 90 minutes, so that was my AM nap. Have a fine Sunday!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:19 (average 4:37). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Cartoon:

Trump* Virus Update:

Click for Interactive Map

US Cases: 5,844,432
US Deaths: 180,228
Plus all the GOP plague murder victims Republicans are hiding from us.

The Showdown at Chicken Liver Gulch:

Yesterday, there was some hilarity here. At my request WWWendy sautéed and gooped some chicken livers. Now Wendy’s opinion of liver is considerably worse than my opinion of Trump*. It was delicious, and I had some for lunch with guacamole, aka goopamole. I often feed her bites of goopamole, when I eat it, so I did so yesterday. I had teasingly asked her if she’d like a bite of liver to see the strength of her NO! So when I offered her the goopamole, she decided that I was using goopamole to hide the liver underneath. Although I have never done anything mean to her, it took me several minutes to convince her that I would not do such a thing, and she enjoyed the goopamole. In fact, I was so considerate that I gargled with Listerine, so I could hug her goodbye without liver on my breath. It was so good, I had more for breakfast.

Short Takes:

From CNN: Maryanne Trump Barry bitterly criticized her brother, President Donald Trump, saying, “Donald’s out for Donald,” and appeared to confirm her niece Mary Trump’s previous allegations that he had a friend take his SATs to get into college, according to audio excerpts obtained by CNN.

The Washington Post first obtained the previously unreleased transcripts and audio from Mary Trump, author of a recent bombshell book about the President and one of his most outspoken critics. Mary Trump, who has said that Donald Trump is unfit to be president and has voiced support for his rival Joe Biden, revealed to the Post that she had secretly taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with Barry in 2018 and 2019.

In one of the conversations revealed by the Post, Trump’s sister called him “cruel.”

Among the some of the more critical comments made by Barry was commenting on how her younger 74-year-old brother operated as president. “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said, according to the recording. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”

This is nothing new to us, but it might influence those few, who are still on the fence. RESIST!!

From NY Times: Tropical Storms Marco and Laura continued to churn in the Caribbean on Saturday, prompting a wave of warnings and watches for several countries, and leading the governor of Louisiana to declare a state of emergency.

Marco on Saturday was about 110 miles northwest of the western tip of Cuba, with maximum sustained winds of 65 miles per hour, the National Hurricane Center said on Saturday night.

Mr. Cline said it was possible that both storms would become hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico as early as Monday. He added that it would be “pretty unusual” and that the last time it happened was in 1933. The last time a hurricane and a tropical storm were both in the Gulf of Mexico was in 1959, he said…[emphasis added]

Note that for the second time, criminal Fuhrer Trump* has stolen FEMA funds to pay for his scams. First, he did so in 2019 to pay for the wall that never happened. Second, he did so to pay for the Unemployment relief that nobody received. I doubt that he will put the money back, even though hurricanes are on the way. RESIST!!

From YouTube (a blast of protest): “He’s Got Bone Spurs” a Roy Zimmerman song parody

So true! Kudos to left wing protestors. RESIST!!

Vote Blue No Matter Who Top to Bottom!!

So Much for "No Collusion"

Posted by TomCat at 12:17 pm Politics

Aug 202020

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on Russian interference in the stolen 2016 Residential election, and the cooperation of criminal Fuhrer Trump* and members of his campaign staff with that interference. So much for “No Collusion”!

IT’S WORTH wondering what the impact might have been had the Senate Intelligence Committee’s final report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election appeared six months ago, before the report of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the twisted account of it provided by Attorney General William P. Barr. On their own terms, the Senate’s findings, released Tuesday after a bipartisan investigation, are explosive: that then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort “formed a close and lasting relationship” with “a Russian intelligence officer,” with whom he shared inside information from the president’s campaign and collaborated to concoct a false narrative that Ukraine, and not Russia, was behind the election interference.

Further, the Senate report states that the Trump campaign “sought to maximize” the impact of leaks of Democratic documents by WikiLeaks, knowing the original source was the Russian military intelligence agency, GRU. The campaign’s intermediary was Roger Stone, whose prison sentence for lying about his involvement and tampering with witnesses was commuted last month by Mr. Trump; the president, the committee “assesses,” lied when he said he never talked to Mr. Stone about WikiLeaks.

Then there is what the Senate investigators glimpsed but could not nail down. The report cites “fragmentary” evidence that Mr. Manafort’s Russian associate Konstantin Kilimnik “may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation,” and two pieces of information linking the campaign chairman himself. The full truth is unknown in part because Mr. Manafort chose to incur an extended prison sentence rather than tell prosecutors the truth about his relationship with the Russian spy.

It is a sad tribute to Mr. Trump’s skill at obfuscation and disinformation that these revelations will likely be ignored by many voters already sated by conflicting accounts of what the president calls the “Russian hoax.” He did it again Tuesday, and on cue, his Senate sycophants — including, contemptibly, the acting Intelligence Committee chairman, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — rushed to assert that the report shows “no collusion” between Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That may be true, in the narrow sense of a criminal conspiracy. Yet the report leaves no doubt that, on instructions of Mr. Putin, Russian intelligence sought to aid Mr. Trump’s election; that Mr. Trump and his campaign welcomed and sought to exploit that aid; and that the president, Mr. Manafort, Mr. Stone and several other key campaign officials then lied about the affair… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Washington Post>

Click through for more. This is certainly worth reading!

‘Devastating’: Revelations From Senate Intel Report

If that isn’t bad enough, criminal Fuhrer Trump’s* response to the report is to seek advise from his boss, the holder of the tapes, Vladimir Putin [R-RU].

Defiant Trump Seeks Putin Meeting After Report Finds He Lied To Mueller About Russia

The bottom line is this. Trump* and Putin are still colluding to steal YOUR White House from YOU again. What are YOU going to do about it?

RESIST!!

Open Thread – 8/17/2020

Posted by TomCat at 10:47 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Aug 172020

It’s a busy day here in the CatBox. Diana, my palliative care nurse will be here shortly for my routine weekly visit. The same stories still dominate the news, so my research took an extra long time. It’s a relatively cool day: only 95° Angry smile . Oh God, it’s Monday!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:48 (average 4:24). To do it, click here. Hoe did you do?

Cartoon:

Trump* Virus Update:

0817TrumpVirusMap

Click here for interactive map.

US Cases: 5,569,520
US Deaths: 173,143
Plus all the many GOP plague murder victims Republicans are hiding from us.

Short Takes:

From Euro-News (Hat-Tip Lona): CLIMATE JUSTICE

This is where Kamala Harris comes into her own. While she was district attorney of San Francisco, 15 years ago, Harris created an environmental justice unit, which specifically existed to deal with cases of environmental crime.

Harris identified that “crimes against the environment are crimes against communities, people who are often poor and disenfranchised,” as she said to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005.

The nexus between socio-economic disadvantage and environmental damage is something Harris has sought to address consistently – long before terms like ‘intersectional environmentalism’ even existed.

More recently, Harris has sued major oil companies after they violated environmental legislation, and after the devastating Refugio oil spill in 2015, the company responsible (Plains All American Pipeline) were indicted on 46 criminal charges.

The following year, after Volkswagen was found to have cheated on its diesel emissions, Harris secured a €73m settlement from the car manufacturer for the state of California.

Although many so called progressives, aka regressives, have whined incessantly that Harris is a “corporate Democrat”, her track record on the environment is quite good. RESIST!!

From YouTube (Raw Story Channel): Trump claims ‘dogs’ are getting mail-in ballots

Barf Bag Alert!!

If criminal Fuhrer Trump gets any more full of shit, we’ll have to paint a crescent moon on his forehead. Obviously it is my feline proclivity to be biased against dawgs, but if they could vote, they would be far more responsible than Republican Sheeple. RESIST!!

From YouTube (a blast of protest): ANTI-REPUBLICAN FUNNY SONG

This song is ten years old. It was spot-on then, and the Republican Reich is so much worse now! Kudos to left-wing protestors! RESIST!!

Vote Blue No Matter Who Top to Bottom!!

If Trump* Gets His Way, He Might Kill Me

Posted by TomCat at 11:37 am Politics

Aug 142020

I am an amputee in a wheel chair. I have stage four metastatic esophageal cancer, spinal cancer, lung cancer and liver cancer. Virtually everything I need to survive, except my chemotherapy treatments at the hospital, I have to buy online. Most of those things, including several of my meds, come by mail. I need USPS to survive, but criminal Fuhrer Trump and the Republican Reich are sabotaging USPS to interfere with the voting rights if people who need to and have the right to vote by mail.

If Americans think that “rigged elections” are something that only happens in far-off countries like Belarus, Trevor Noah had a rude awakening for them. “It already, it’s already starting to rear its ugly head right here,” he said.

The Daily Show host was of course talking about President Donald Trump’s stunning admission in a Fox News interview on Thursday morning that he is actively blocking funding for the U.S. Postal Service to prevent them from being able to accommodate universal mail-in voting.

“They need that money in order to have the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo of two provisions he opposes in the Democrat’s coronavirus relief bill. “But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”

“Goddamn,” Noah replied after playing the clip. “I’ve never seen a villain give away a plan like that without seeing James Bond tied to a chair in front of him.”…

Inserted From <The Daily Beast>

Here’s the included video.

Trump Plainly Admits Plan to Limit Mail-In Voting

Barf Bag Alert!!

In short, Trump* and the Republican Reich are trying to steal the votes of millions of Americans. That’s bad enough. Republicans don’t care that they are sabotaging a Constitutionally guaranteed service that millions need to survive. I’m one of them. If Trump* gets his way, he might kill me.

RESIST!!

Open Thread – 8/14/2020

Posted by TomCat at 11:36 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Aug 142020

It’s a sickly day here in the CatBox. I experimented with a new kind of goop this morning, and sometimes such experiments fail. It blocked my tumor, and I spent most of the morning throwing up. On the plus side, most of my goop experiments have been successful, giving me a variety of tasty things to eat. TGIF!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Speaking of goop, today’s took me 3:29 (average 5:22). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Cartoon:

Republicans HATE this treaty, ratified unanimously by our founding fathers.

Trump* Virus Update:

Click for interactive map

US Cases: 5,418,071
US Deaths: 170,446
Plus all Trump’s* Murder victims Republicans are hiding from us

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: In a blistering takedown of Joe Biden’s running mate, Donald Trump on Thursday accused Senator Kamala Harris of maliciously speaking in complete sentences.

Blasting her penchant for hewing to the rules of grammar, Trump said, “A lot of people are saying, mean, nasty, disrespectful. To a new level, like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Sad,” he said. “Sick and sad.”

I’m not buying that fib, Andy! Trump is much too racist to say any minority can speak in complete sentences. RESIST!!

From YouTube (MSNBC Channel): Trump Speechless After Reporter Asks If He Regrets Lying To Americans

The lies are bad enough. Even worse, he and the Republican Reich have murdered over 8.52 Americans with their Trump* virus plague for each of those 20,000+ lies! RESIST!!

From YouTube (a blast of protest): DUMP TRUMP SONG – Leigh & The Dumpettes

Amen! Flush!! Kudos to left wing protestors! RESIST!!

Vote Blue No Matter Who Top to Bottom!!

Open Thread – 8/12/2020

Posted by TomCat at 10:42 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Aug 122020

It’s a relatively comfortable day, here in the CatBox with two days in the 70°s, before the next heat wave builds to a 100°+ weekend. WWWendy and WWKristin returned safely and happy, albeit sunburned. They return your greetings and kind wishes. Tomorrow I may have no more than as Personal Update or an Open Thread. It’s a WWWendy day, but I won’t know when she’s coming until after she gets her work schedule later today. It’s also a grocery delivery day. Happy Hump Day to all!

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 3:04 (average 5:15). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Cartoon:

Trump* Virus Update:

0812TrumpVirusMap

US Cases: 5,309,622
US Deaths: 167,789

Short Takes:

From The New Yorker: In a rare instance of praising one of his White House predecessors, Donald J. Trump on Tuesday hailed Woodrow Wilson for opposing efforts to institute online learning during the 1918 pandemic.

“There were a lot of crybabies in 1918 saying, ‘The schools aren’t safe—let the kids learn on their computers,’ ” Trump told reporters at the White House. “Woody wouldn’t hear of it.”

Instead, Trump said, “Kids went to school and the influenza just kind of disappeared eventually. Woody did a fantastic job.”

Dang, Andy! Are you sure he didn’t praise Wilson because of his overt racism and KKK support? RESIST!!

From Alternet: Remember when political reporters crowed about what a masterful play Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had made when he lined up his caucus to acquit Donald Trump without hearing from a single witness? Yeah, that acquittal came on February 6 when U.S. senators were already getting briefed on the seriousness of the coronavirus’ spread abroad.

But Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, fell all over themselves to make sure Trump was at the helm when the pandemic hit U.S. shores. Now, what once looked like a promising cycle for Senate Republicans has turned entirely treacherous precisely because the caucus is saddled with Trump as their standard bearer.

Politico reports the party is directing nearly its entire $100 million war chest at saving the seats of eight incumbent senators while the few GOP candidates aiming to defeat a Democrat have been left almost entirely to their own devices. With the exception of funneling a little money into the effort to defeat Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama, they simply don’t have the resources to play offense.

The seat of Democratic Sen. Gary Peters from Michigan, for instance, once seemed like a flippable seat. But as Trump has tanked in the state and Joe Biden is presently positioned very well there, Senate Republicans have left Republican candidate John James to fend for himself.

Instead, GOP groups, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund have been trying to bolster their defenses in Georgia, Iowa, and Montana—three states that weren’t even on the radar as potential Democratic pick ups when the cycle started.

I wonder how much of that money is going to help Bought Bitch Midnight Moscow Mitch. This shows how desperate the Republican Reich has become. May all their efforts fail! RESIST!!

From YouTube (a blast of protest): Noodle Muffin’s “Morning in America” Music Video

Under Trump*, we are mourning in America! Kudos to left-wing protestors! RESIST!!

Vote Blue No Matter Who Top to Bottom!!

How Will Trump* Try to Cling to Power?

Posted by TomCat at 11:05 am Politics

Aug 112020

The more time that goes on, the more obvious it becomes that Resident Donald Trump*, traitor, criminal, and Fuhrer of the Republican Fifth Reich, cannot win the November 2020 election. That leaves him two ways to try to cling to power. Will he try to steal the election? Failing that, will he ignore it?

CNN reporter April Ryan believes if President Trump loses the 2020 presidential election, he will have to be removed from the oval office by force.

Many have wondered whether Trump will leave willingly if he loses the election and what would happen if he refuses to concede to Joe Biden. Trump didn’t calm fears when he refused to give a straight answer about accepting a Democratic win on November 3.

During a Sunday appearance on CNN Newsroom with host Ana Cabrera, Cabrera asked Ryan and guest Bill Kristol about the president downplaying mail-in ballots and attempting to delay mid-term elections. Ryan responded calling Trump a hypocrite for using mail-in ballots himself and said he’s trying to suppress votes… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Black Enterprise>

Trump Wielding Presidency Like An Autocrat: To Preserve His Power

Trump* is the symptom, not the disease. Long before Trump* became Fuhrer of the Republican Reich, I have warned you over and over again. Republicans will do whatever they can to establish a permanent, National Socialist, plutocratic Republican Reich. They want elections to exist for show only, as they decide who gets to vote, and they count the votes. Right now they have never been closer to achieving that goal. We must stop them at all costs!

RESIST!!

Open Thread – 8/11/2020

Posted by TomCat at 11:04 am Open Thread, Personal, Politics

Aug 112020

It’s a crazy day here in the CatBox. Providence already approved the Pembrolizumab treatments. WWWendy will get her schedule tomorrow from school, and I’ll be scheduling treatments as soon as I know what’s best for her. The 25 µg Fentanyl patch is giving me much better pain relief. For the first time in months, my pain level has been zero all day, except for when I Republicated a brick that made my hemorrhoids bleed. May all your Republicans be softer.

Jig Zone Puzzle:

Today’s took me 2:49 (average 4:37). To do it, click here. How did you do?

Cartoon:

Trump* Virus Update:

0811TrumpVirusMap

US Cases: 5,254,561
US Deaths: 166,295

Short Takes:

From Daily Kos: Donald Trump has repeatedly and far-too-publicly mused over wanting his own face carved into Mount Rushmore. This we knew. Over the weekend, however, we learned that it has gone a bit farther than mere public desire: On Saturday, The New York Times reported that an unnamed Trump White House aide “reached out” to the office of South Dakota’s Republican governor to inquire as to what the process of adding new heads to Mount Rushmore might actually be.

Mt. Rushmore is on sacred Native American land. Can you imagine anything more sacrilegious than carving the head of criminal Fuhrer Trump* in a sacred place? RESIST!!

From NY Times: President Trump is considering new immigration rules that would allow border officials to temporarily block an American citizen or legal permanent resident from returning to the United States from abroad if the authorities have reason to believe the person may be infected with the coronavirus.

In recent months, Mr. Trump has imposed sweeping rules that ban entry by foreigners into the United States, citing the risk of allowing the virus to spread from hot spots abroad. But those rules have exempted two categories of people trying to return: American citizens and foreigners who have already established legal residence.

Worrying about spreading Trump* virus from Mexico to the US is bass ackwards. Mexico should be worried, not the US. Being Black or Latino will be “reason to believe the person may be infected” with Trump* virus, especially before election day. RESIST!!

From YouTube (a blast of protest): Donald Trump Anti-Wall Protest Song<.p>

Amen! Kudos to left wing protestors! RESIST!!

Vote Blue No Matter Who Top to Bottom!!

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